2010 Young Adult Reading Challenge [Updated]

[Original Post: November 23, 2009, Updated: August 28, 2010, challenge halfway done]

The second, equally pleasurable challenge I have decided to join is J. Kaye's 2010 Young Adult Reading Challenge.  My shelves are full of YA books I am longing to read, and they could always be fuller.

The rules are as follows:

1. Anyone can join. You don't need a blog to participate.

     --Non-Bloggers: Post your list of books in the comment section of the wrap-up post. To learn how to sign up without having a blog, click here.

2. There are four levels:

     --The Mini YA Reading Challenge – Read 12 Young Adult novels.

     --Just My Size YA Reading Challenge – Read 25 Young Adult novels.

     --Stepping It Up YA Reading Challenge – Read 50 Young Adult novels.

     --Super Size Me YA Reading Challenge – Read 75 Young Adult novels.

3. Audio, eBooks, paper all count.

4. No need to list your books in advance. You may select books as you go. Even if you list them now, you can change the list if needed.

5. Challenge runs January 1st through December, 2010.

I will be attempting the "Just My Size" Challenge, and I will post my progress here once the Challenge begins.


Click here if you are interested in joining the Young Adult Reading Challenge.

My progress to date (Original post was 11/23/09):

1. Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden (1996, Australia) ***1/2, finished January 4.
2. Sabriel by Garth Nix (1995, Australia) ***, finished March 12. 
3. What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell (2008, USA) ***, finished March 13. 
4. Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta (2008, Australia) ****, finished April 21.
5. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness (2008, UK/USA) ***1/2, finished May 30.
6. Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder (2005, USA) ***1/2, finished July 4.
7. The Princess and the Hound by Mette Ivie Harrison (2007, USA) ***, finished July 10. 
8. Magic Study by Maria V. Snyder (2006, USA) ***, finished July 14.
9. House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer (2002, USA) ***1/2, finished July 21. 
10. Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett (1987, UK) ***, finished August 8.
11. Feeling Sorry for Celia by Jaclyn Moriarty (2000, Australia) ***, finished August 12.
12. The China Garden by Liz Berry (1996, UK) ***1/2, finished August 17. 
13. The Dead of Night by John Marsden (1994, Australia) ***1/2, finished August 25.

Sexual Ethics - Ooku: The Inner Chambers, Volumes 1 and 2

(Jet lag is always worst for me on my second day in a new time zone - when there isn't any travel exhaustion to lure me into sleep - and it turns out that the shift seven time zones to the east is a particular variety of awful.  Last night I didn't get to sleep until almost 7 a.m. (it wasn't just that I saw the dawn, but that I heard all my neighbors get up and go to work before falling asleep), and I slept until 3 p.m.  Brutal. Silver lining: I am getting a lot of reading done, albeit in a dazed, inattentive sort of way.  Last night I swept through the rest of Grave Goods, the third installment of Ariana Franklin's "Mistress of the Art of Death" series.  Gripping. Anxiety-inducing.  And the anxieties have more to do with choices that the heroine, Adelia, makes to pursue happiness as they do with the corpses and psychopaths that litter her path.

Having finished that, I organized all the books on my bedside table and all the books I had brought home from my travels into a strict reading rotation: one slow read / one fast read, cycling through fiction and non-fiction, fantasy and mystery, romance and comics, and interlarding this rotation with Canadian fiction at regular intervals.

Still not tired.

So I picked up the second volume in Fumi Yoshinaga's manga cycle, Ooku: The Inner Chambers, which is the perfect combination of captivating intrigue and thoughtfully paced artwork to soothe the insomniac fever.)

The facts as I know them are these: when the third shogun of the Tokugawa dynasty came to power in Japan in the early 17th century, he began putting into place a series of isolationist policies.  His grandfather had emerged victorious from a long period of civil turmoil, and had instituted the shogunate, a centralizing authority based on military power that (putatively) administered the workings of all Japan at the request of the imperial family.  The centre of power shifted from Kyoto (the site of the royal court) to Edo, and the political emphasis leaned to stability and unity - of religion, of mercantile interests, and of civic and military power.   European traders and missionaries were increasingly distrusted for their destabilizing influence, and in the 1630s Iemetsu enacted a series of reforms that insulated his country almost totally from their influence.  Traders are restricted to a single island, and to dealings with a short list of approved families.  Citizens must affirm their loyalty to established Japanese faiths.  No one may enter or leave Japan without permission, and those who leave must expect never to come back.

What Fumi Yoshinaga attempts in her manga is not so much a full-fledged alternate history (how would things have gone differently if "X" had or hadn't happened?) as an alternate explanation of the history (let's imagine why this historical turn occurred).  The question of why Japan had to be so firmly closed off - one might even say quarantined - from outside influences and inquiries lurks in the background of this series.

The first volume, which I read in July while in Washington, DC and (alas) left there temporarily in the interest of lightening my luggage, lays out the core of this alternate causality, and it is a bit of a comics classic: an unknown source brings a strange plague to the island of Japan - the red pox - and it spreads quickly among the men, killing mostly the young swiftly and more than decimating the male population.  Those of you who have read Y: The Last Man (or The Knife of Never Letting Go) may find this a familiar premise - the crucial difference is that this plague doesn't seem to obliterate a whole gender, but rather radically diminishes its numbers.

The importance of this shift in the ratio of men to women soon becomes clear. Some years later we find a nation in which the gender map of social hierarchy has been inverted. Since the men haven't been totally wiped out, what happens is an alteration in the economics of gender.  Women are now the labor force, and both families and governmental structures have become matriarchal.  Men are prized, but not for themselves so much as what they carry in their pants.  They are regarded as creatures too delicate and precarious for harsh treatment, and much is done to preserve their value.  But their value is utterly alienated from any sense of autonomy, any right to choose their actions or how they will contribute to the common wealth of family and nation, any sense that an individual man can pursue his personal happiness.  Matriarchs regularly sell their sons' sexual services - temporarily or permanently - to the highest bidder to support the family. Marriage (which ties male procreative potential to a single womb) becomes the province of only the wealthiest families, those who can buy their daughters the exclusive rights to a man's bed. Poorer women muster their savings to afford a night at a brothel, and the hope that they might conceive.

Early in the first volume, the hero (Mizuno, a breathtakingly beautiful youth) talks about his charms with a childhood friend from a rich merchant family.  We all know of your skills with women, she tells him, but I also know that you always choose to sleep with women who are getting older and can't afford the brothels.  This type of heroism - sexuality as generosity of spirit - is unusual in romance or any other genre of literature I have read, and it is one that we see over and over again in the first two volumes of Ooku.  In a readerly world in which sexual restraint and fidelity are exalted (while sexual profligacy is often secreted envied and admired) this is a new model of ethical sexuality: a restraint based on choosing, not a single partner, but a partner who needs you most.  And we frequently stumble upon situations in which a major character is forced into sexual encounters or sexual identities against his or her will (the setting is a harem, after all), and must choose a way of coming to terms with the situation which preserves personal ethics, and with them, a sense of self.

It soon emerges that Mizuno's childhood friend is madly in love with him, but her wealthy family feels she could make a more advantageous match, so she is left to watch him bestow his generosity on poorer, more desperate women.  Despite a rakish bravado, Mizuno loves her as well, but since he cannot have her, he chooses to join the Ooku, the inner chambers of the Shogun's palace where the leader's sexual attendants are cloistered.  This is a bit of status maneuvering for him and his family: he is outflanking his mother's attempts to force him into profitability for the family by asserting his autonomous ambition.  He will choose, instead of having his fate thrust upon him (as Malvolio might have put it), to become a member of the elite group of those who give their sexual bodies to the state itself.  It conveys great honour on the family, while allowing him to pick his poison.

The shogun, like almost everyone else in a position of power at this point, is female, and thus the Ooku is filled with men.  Catty, backstabbing, politicking men.  The fact that the current shogun is just a child doesn't dull this poisonous atmosphere.  In fact, because the shogun never calls upon their services, and no other woman is permitted into the Ooku, it just means that they are more likely to turn to rape as an instrument of domination. (Or so they claim - I am not sure that certain members of the Inner Chambers wouldn't have turned to this tactic without any excuse at all, simply out of unbridled cruelty.)  I became uncomfortable at a certain point in the first volume, thinking that homosexuality would be portrayed as almost synonymous with violence and degradation, but, as with the treatment of gender differences, Yoshinaga's approach to the issue is more indirect and complex than I anticipated.  Of course, she asserts, an insular society of men (one as cut off from the rest of Japan as the female-dominated insula of Japan is from the rest of the world) yields violence and specifically the violence of sexual frustration, but it also produces bonds of profound affection and longing.  And sexual generosity operates within these bonds as well.   Still, I hope to see relationships between men in future volumes that are not based in either cruelty or a sort of affectionate pity.

After the first volume, I had a few qualms. First among them (and shared by almost all of the English readers whose comments and reviews I have read) is a discomfort with the diction of the translation.  The Japanese is rendered in a sort of Renaissance Faire English which is almost unbearably clumsy.  Luckily this fades into a gentler archaism in the second volume. Secondly, the first volume sets up a compelling story - about the brash Mizuno and the impossibility of his childhood love - and then resolves it with shocking swiftness by the end of the first volume, abandoning these characters just as we were getting to know them.  Their romance seems short-changed, and I found myself wondering why I had even bothered getting to know Mizuno if he was going to prove so unimportant to the ongoing story of the Inner Chambers.  Perhaps if this had been a one-off middle volume I would have felt less like the victim of a bait-and-switch.

At the end of the first volume, a new and dynamic shogun has come to power, and she is driven by an unprecedented curiosity about why the customs of the shogunate have ossified in the particular way they have.  Why, for instance, does she have to dress in men's clothing when receiving the rare and highly-guarded diplomatic envoys that make their way from other countries?  She seeks out the archives of the shogunate, and begins to read about the origins of the Red Pox-scarred society.

The second volume takes up this tale-within-a-tale from years before, choosing as its peep-hole into history the experience of a nobleman-turned-Buddhist-abbot in the age of Iemetsu, the first shogun to see the land ravaged by the Red Pox.  Prior Arikoto is a man of striking beauty but also untouchable holiness, and he has high hopes for the good he can do now that he is finally ascending to a position of some prominence in the clergy.  He goes to present his credentials to the shogun, as is customary, and is shocked when he is ordered to extend his stay.  He will be joining the Ooku, he is told, to be one of Iemetsu's catamites.  His carefully phrased excuses are not accepted, and he is forced to break his vows of celibacy with a courtesan in the most brutal way.  Finally he is taken to the Inner Chambers, where he becomes one of only a handful of men who know that Iemetsu is dead, and the shogunate is being held by his illegitimate daughter until such a time as she can finally produce a male heir.

The characterization is deeper here, although it covers some of the same ethical ground (how to maintain an integrity of self when one's right to sexual autonomy is infringed or even removed), and these story arcs (thank goodness) look like they will last over at least one more book.  But I was still perturbed by one scene, at the end of the novel (skip to the next section if you are feeling spoiler-shy today), when Arikoto finally submits to the shogun and the manner in which he does it is clearly intended to be transgressive.  To punish the arrogance of the inner circle of men who know who she actually is and fail to respect her as a shogun because of her gender, the rather petulant shogun (she has no name, since she is merely a vessel for the next male leader) demands that they all attend her wearing women's garments. She is dressed, of course, in her customary boy's clothes, lest anyone catch a glimpse of her and know that the nation is lacking masculine leadership.  She humiliates the men who have presumed a gendered superiority to her, asserting through the crudest symbolism that, whatever they may say, it is she who holds all the power.

But then Arikoto walks in wearing his female garments and he looks ... impeccable. As stunning a courtesan as she is a boy.  And he proceeds to give her a seductive speech in which he lays out his new calling.  He had believed that he was fated to bring solace to many through religion; now he sees that he was put on this earth for a much more focused purpose.

"Why did I not see what was so plain?  I can provide succor to one person in this world, and to one person alone.  And that person, the one I was born into this world to help, was right in front of me all this time."

The volume winds to its close with her weeping uncontrollably in his arms, as he murmurs, "How lovely she is, my lord and master." On the final page, a real stunner, they cling to each other, and the text reads, "It was a love that began like two cold, hurt, bedraggled chicks huddling together for warmth."

You will get no complaints to me about that last page - it is flawless in tone and execution.  But I worry that the scene that precedes it is too convinced of its own transgressions, when in fact it just affirms very established gendered codes.  The shogun, dressed and addressed as a man and a lord, punishes her upstart underlings with a forced feminization.  The only one who escapes humiliation is Arikoto, and he successfully resists it by being sincerely feminine - lovelier than anyone else in the room in a costume and elaborate make-up that do not read as falsehood.  And why can he do that? Because he has come to the room with the intention of submitting, of dedicating his life to a single being (not himself, by the by) and to the act of caretaking. Hmm.  The troubling of this association between femininity and caring submission comes in the final panels, when it is the dominant party (the shogun herself) who breaks down in tears and requires the strength that underlies that seeming passivity.  And why does she break down?  Because she is an overwhelmed, underloved teenaged girl, for all the power she wields.  Complex, but not revolutionary.

Righto.  Return to me now, ye spoiler-shy.

Awards have showered down on this series all over the world, praising it for the quality of its aesthetics and its nuanced treatment of gender and sexuality.  The publishers note how unusual a phenomenon it is - it fits into none of the gendered genres of manga, refuses a rushed reading, and appeals equally to Western comics readers and manga aficionados.

I  myself am not an experienced reader of manga, apart from a few Osamu Tezuka classics and some Western imitators along the lines of Scott Pilgrim. In fact, I found myself attending to the visual composition of Ooku much more appreciatively than I normally do (to my shame) with Western comics, because I had to be constantly vigilant about the way I was reading to keep myself from falling back into old habits like starting at the left-hand side of the page or turning the pages right to left.  And it was worth it: as a visual phenomenon, this is an elegant work.  The edition is poetically beautiful, with richly textured black endpapers and a semi-transparent title page.  It is a finely paced work, visually, managing the reader's attention by enforcing reflective pauses as characters come to slow realizations over several panels. And it punctuates the romances in both volumes with whole-page, climactic moments of iconic sweep - the characters caught up in a whirl of robes and emotions - that rival the highlights of classic Hollywood love.

I have the next volume on my bedside table, and the fourth one on order. The fifth is due to come out in December.  The series, which I understand will be ten volumes long, is still unfinished even in Japanese.  Although I quibble with aspects of it above, I can't help but give it this compliment: it is a rich and thoughtful world, so much so that I argued ethics with myself continually as I read.  Seek it out, and let me know what you think.  It is certainly worth it.



Note that it is almost 3:30 a.m. as I post this. Ah jet lag - when will you release me from your sleepless clutches?

Sunday Salon: On Water- and Bookbending

This is my last  week in Hawai'i, more or less.  A week from Tuesday I head back to Nova Scotia via Los Angeles to prepare for the start of the Fall term.   D has been asked to stay on indefinitely, which has him feeling a bit morose. ("Don't say this is your last week in Hawai'i," he just moaned, reading over my shoulder, "You should stay for, um, nineteen weeks.")

This has been a week of blog absence, since I have been hard at work on a set of article revisions that were due on Friday.  For perhaps the first time in my life as an academic, I actually got the revisions in several hours ahead of the deadline, an achievement which is undercut somewhat by the fact that Hawai'i is several hours behind the rest of the U.S.

My favorite tidbit, culled from the research I did for this article?  John Huston collaborated with Jean-Paul Sartre on an early version of the script for his 1962 biopic Freud, which starred the great (always a bit ambivalent and haunted) Monty Clift as the father of psychoanalysis.  Later Sartre would renounce all connection to the film, but in these early stages he and Huston were filled with enthusiasm for casting Marilyn Monroe as a patient of Freud's.  She refused the role - because her own analyst had qualms about the potential heterodoxy of the work, which hadn't been approved by Anna Freud (herself a major figure in psychiatry). I've got to get my hands on this film.

OK: I need to seek your advice on a problem that arose while I was working.  Since I am traveling, for the first time I bought a bunch of relevant academic texts in ebook format (either for the Kindle or the Barnes and Noble reader), and I was delighted by how affordable they were - $9.99 for academic tomes. Giddy, I tell you.

But there was trouble in e-Paradise. First of all, since I read Kindle books on my Mac, I can't highlight, annotate or search those works.  Why, Amazon, would you release a reader without these features?  Boo.  But more worrisome still is the problem of citation: page numbers on ebooks don't match the print edition, and Kindle books don't use page numbering at all.  Instead they have Kindle locations, which are stable (they don't change when you alter the size of the font or page), but require your reader to own the Kindle edition if they are to follow your citation.  Hmm.  Not exactly a research practice that is broadly transparent. Normally, I would prefer to cite hard copies of books, because this still carry the greatest "authority" in profession publications (and will until the citation problem has been fixed - this is the only thing that I can think of, besides Luddite snobbery, that is standing in the way), but there is one book that the University of Hawai'i doesn't own in hard copy that I need to use.  I even tried the old stand-by of using Google Books to sync the location of my ebook quotation with its page in the paper edition, but this volume can't be previewed in Google Books.  (Seriously, checking the accuracy of your citations is so much less time-consuming in the age of Google Books. Oh, the glories of being an internet-age scholar.)  So here's my question: have any of you used ebooks (and specifically Kindle books) for academic purposes?  How do you going about citing them? (I am talking here about footnotes or parenthetical citations, rather than bibliographic entries, which are fairly simple.)

So, I sent the article off on Friday, and we headed off to Oahu's North Shore to celebrate.  We visited the Byodo-In Temple on the way (more on this in a future post, I hope) - the perfect place to decompress after a stressful week - and then ate ahi poke and butterfish at the Turtle Bay resort, which is just at the point where the windward coast turns into the North Shore.  We watched the sun set from Sunset Beach, where I kicked back in the sand with my rotation of three books and D wandered in the surf.  And then we came back later that night to lie on the beach and watch the Perseid meteor shower.  The previous night we tried to watch from Waikiki beach, and saw a few "shooting stars," but the light pollution is much worse on the south side of the island, and you can only see the very brightest points in the sky.  I have to admit that I may have been unconscious for a good part of Friday evening - there is something about sleeping in sand amidst almost total darkness, with the surf rushing in the background and meteors tracing their way through the sky, that is very, very refreshing.

Yesterday we went on a snorkling expedition with some of the people D works with on the show, and actually managed to avoid terrible sunburns, although we also managed to avoid any trace of dolphins, which are less active in the afternoons.  Today is more relaxing - getting some long-missed blogging, cleaning up, perhaps going for a hike up Diamond Head later this afternoon, when it is cooler.


Reading

I finished Feeling Sorry for Celia this week, an Australian YA novel in epistolary (love it) form.  It features a teenaged heroine who is a long-distance runner, which I confess made me think of my marvelous friend RP, who is both a YA-reader (/librarian) and a marathoner, both of which, I think we can agree, are awesome accomplishments.

In the novel, Elizabeth Clarry has an eccentric best friend who keeps disappearing, an alienated father who is making awkward attempts to reacquaint himself with her, a mother who communicates largely through epic post-it notes (HEY! ELIZABETH!! OVER HERE! IN FRONT OF THIS HOUSE PLANT!! IT'S A NOTE FROM YOUR MOTHER!!!! WEAR EXTRA LAYERS TODAY! IT'S GOING TO BE COLD.), an anonymous admirer who shares her daily bus, a school-mandated pen-pal, and a half-marathon to train for. She is also the target of an endless slew of communications from organizations like "the Best Friends Club," "the Cold Hard Truth Association," and "the Young Romance Society," all of whom seem to think she is making a terrible, deflating mess of the life she has been given.  This was a fun read - once I became engrossed in it about a hundred pages in, I didn't put it down or sleep till I had finished it.  I appreciated how it presented teenaged sexuality - both having sex and never having been kissed are presented as legitimate, realistic, and problematic experiences for a fifteen-year-old, and they neither make you more or less cool, admirable, or sympathetic.  There were problems however, both with the epistolary format and with the relationship Elizabeth has with her best friend, that will keep this book out of my permanent library.  I'm hoping to have time for a longer review before I give it away via Bookmooch at the start of this week.

I am in the midst of two books now, Liz Berry's (paranormal?  I feel it is heading in that direction) YA romance The China Garden and Carrie Tiffany's Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living.  In Berry's book, which I have just begun, Clare accompanies her mother to a nursing job on a remote English country estate in the weeks before she heads off to university.  As soon as they arrive, it becomes clear that there is a lot that has been hidden from her, not the least of which is that her mother was born on the estate, and has long and tortured relationship with the people who never left. My friend CM, who always has great recommendations for thrilling YA, put me on to this one.

Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living starts in the 1930s in Australia (what can I say? I'm on an Aussie kick.), where the Better-Farming Train is making its way through the arid farmlands of the country staging lectures and demonstrations on modern agricultural and domestic science.  Jean Finnegan has been hired as the needlework lecturer, and in her year of service she meets Robert Pettigree, a soil expert, who persuades her to embark on the experiment of a scientific marriage.  It is totally engrossing - my only wish so far (and I am halfway through the novel at this point) is that we had spent more time on the train, which contains a cast of characters so vibrant and is a space so interesting that it could have filled a much longer novel. (Also: it appears to be on extreme sale at Amazon right now.  It always irks me to see this after I have already bought a book.  Hrumph.)

Watching 

Last night we swatched It Happened One Night, which I have been thinking about since last summer when we traveled through northern Maine, with its abundance of old-school housekeeping cottages.  Clark Gable (who is brilliant here, unsurprisingly) and Claudette Colbert finds their unmarried selves in a series of these cottages in the course of the movie, as they flee her worried millionaire father by Greyhound bus, and they deal with the impropriety by erecting the "walls of Jericho" (a blanket hung from a clothesline) down the middle of the room.  This is a surprisingly, delightfully saucy movie, featuring (I have to note) a slow, defiant striptease on Gable's part, but as a romance it has some troubling gender politics.

Besides this, we are totally enmeshed in a revolving array of TV shows that are available on Netflix's digital streaming (which announced this week that it is opening a Canadian service this Fall - hurrah!).  We are making our slow way through the new version of Doctor Who and its companion series Torchwood.  We jumped in to the newest series while we were in London this summer, bringing the greatest possible naivete to the episodes we saw there. ("Wait," D said, "So he travels in a phone booth that is bigger on the inside than on the outside?")  Since then we have gone back to watch all of the Christopher Eccleston episodes, and we are now well into David Tennant's brilliant tenure.  In last night's really sort of dreadful episode, from the third season, I finally learned why I get so many Google hits from people looking for information about the Sycorax.  It's because the Doctor went back to 1599 and casually mentioned his old nemeses - the mind-controlling Sycorax race of alien beings - to the Bard of Avon.  Apparently, good old Will Shagspere held onto that tidbit for many a year until he had need of an unnerving magical back story for The Tempest. It now occurs to me that I have seriously deepened the Google confusion with this post.  Ah well.  Hello, Tardis travelers! Welcome to Sycorax Pine, where we have no intention of controlling your minds via your type-A+ blood.  I promise. (But can you trust me?)

More importantly, we have become hopelessly enthralled to Avatar: The Last Airbender.  Rest assured that this is neither the Shyamalan-helmed movie (let us never speak of that again) nor an epic tale of the colonial oppression of blue, sensitive-tailed creatures.  You will not have to wear special 3D glasses.  Rather it is a visually inventive, richly characterized, well-written animated series with some of the most stunning martial arts sequences I have seen in many years.  It is a highly intelligent work, built out of deceptively simple premises (like many of the best works for children): the episode we just watched had scenes that were obviously influenced by Kurosawa's Yojimbo and its Western inheritors.

The world of Avatar is a war torn one: there used to be four nations that existed in perfect balance (Earth, Air, Fire, and Water), each with its own particular form of magic, which comes in the form of the ability to "bend," or manipulate, the nation's element.  The balance was always maintained by an "avatar," a warrior-lama who has mastery of all the different forms of bending.  But a century ago the new avatar, just a child, disappeared, and shortly after that - for reasons we don't completely understand yet - the Fire nation began a rampaging conquest of its neighbors' territories.  Now, after a hundred years of bloodshed, two Water nation children from the south pole find the young avatar (Aang) and his six-legged flying bison of a spirit-guide (Appa, who is a brilliantly drawn character in his own right) glacially preserved in unnatural youth.  The three children embark on a quest to train Aang, who is the last surviving member of the Air nation, in the bending of the three other elements so that he can turn the tide of war against the hyperaggressive Fire nation.

These three are really well-rendered - each given their own strengths,  weaknesses, areas of expertise, and feelings of responsibility that affect the adventures they have - but their plots tend toward the "very special episode" realm of lesson-learning.  Even better is the emerging story of the ruling family of Fire nation: the crown prince, Zuku, is my favorite character of the series (D tends to favor his uncle, an epicure of philosophical bent).  He has been attacked and banished by his father, and left with a vicious scar on his face from the violent confrontation.  He is a continual disappointment when compared to his gifted and heartless firebending sister, who tries (among other things) to convince him when they are still small children that their father plans to murder him.  His father has told him that the only way to restore his honor and earn a repeal of his banishment is to bring in the avatar as a prisoner, so he singlemindedly hunts Aang from one end of the world to the other.  We see him do callous, cruel things, but the more we learn of him, the more this seems a product of environment, of upbringing.  And the longer he wanders the world, the more his environment continues to work upon him, revealing how much he has in common with the heroic Aang.  His very pursuit of Aang often pits him against his own nation (which has sent other agents to destroy the Avatar), and the lines between capturing and rescuing begin to blur.

I don't even have time to get into the visual ingenuity of the film-making here, but if you can accustom yourself to some clanging moments of manga-style silliness you will also see some strikingly graceful images and movements drawn from (and built off of) that genre as well.

The fights (each nation has a fighting style based on a different discipline of Asian martial arts) are consistently my favorite part of each episode: in a recent episode that dealt with a blind girl who becomes the champion of Earth nation's WWE-style fighting league, her perception of the world around her is rendered so brilliantly that I exclaimed, "I have never seen anything like this."  Really: seek it out, and be patient through the simplicity of the early episodes.  It is one of my favorite discoveries of this year.